Matthew 13

Have you ever run into a situation where you feel called to talk to someone about Jesus and salvation, but you back off because you are worried they will have questions you can’t answer? I sure have; we as humans will never fully understand everything, but God gave us the Bible as a guide and the rest is faith.

The Bible is our guide, it helps us build a foundation that supports our continued faith. Last week I was reading through Matthew 13 “the Parable of the Sower” and it clicked how important a foundation is. Our faith is a living thing, and like all living things if it does not have a proper source of sustenance (foundation or the Word) our faith will die. To use another example, if you built a fire and the fire represented your faith and oxygen/wood represented your foundation what would happen if you took the wood or oxygen away? You would no longer have a fire, the same is true with our faith.

This Bible passage also brought another thought to mind. I have often thought about people that get baptized right after hearing about Jesus for the first time, and Matthew 13:5-6 made me think about this. I don’t think that baptizing someone right after they hear about Jesus is wrong, but it always worried me. Now I know why it did, these people are like the seeds that fell on the rocky soil, they have a large “rush” of Jesus, but quickly fall back to their old ways. Like I said before it is not wrong to baptize people right after they learn about Jesus, but my warning to the people that are baptizing others is that you should make sure that the person has someone who can give them support and teach them the foundation after. I like to think of it as transplanting the plant to the good soil.

It is always important to have a proper foundation, so please if you are new to having a relationship with Jesus, ask someone to guide you through some of your questions, and build up your foundation.

Our responsibilities as Christians is to build our foundation so we can step out in faith, and start a new foundation for somebody else. By talking to that person on the street or at work you are doing this!